War of words over 'Pocahontas'

Donald Trump’s gaffe-a-day presidency surpassed itself last week when he told a contingent of Navajos visiting the White House about a “Pocahontas” in Congress. The barb was directed at Democrat Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren whose claim of Native American ancestry has been the subject of some doubt. In his eagerness to insult a Democrat, the US president ended up insulting the people whom he was supposed to be honouring for their unique service during World War II.

“Pocahontas” is a racial slur on several levels. At its very basic, referring to the Native American population, so tragically destroyed by the guns, germs and steel of the white settlers, as Pocahontas is as casually offensive as calling an African-American “nigger” or, to understand it in Indian terms, a Hindutva ideologue chaddi, a north-easterner a “chink”, a Nepali “Bahadur” and so on. 

For Native Americans, Pocahontas is also the equivalent of an “Uncle Tom,” a coloured person who panders to white racial stereotyping. She was a Native American woman kidnapped by white settlers in Virginia and, so legend has it, when given the chance to return to her people, chose to stay with the English. Converted to Christianity, she married an Englishman. Seventeenth century English society projected her as the “civilised savage”, who personified the benefits of imbibing “superior” western civilisation. 

Ms Warren was quick to react to Mr Trump’s calculated personal dig, though she did not care to allay doubts about the veracity of her claims and had little to say about the gross insult sustained by a people with whom she claims common ancestry. 

Sadly, that was true of the uproar of liberal indignation over this latest presidential blooper. Few spared a thought for that small contingent of doughty elderly Navajos — the last of the famous contingent of 420 code talkers who played such a critical role in the Pacific campaigns. Colourfully dressed in their Sunday best for the occasion, they had clearly registered the insult — watch their dumbfounded expressions on TV grabs. Their representative later excoriated the president for this “latest example of deep-rooted ignorance of Native Americans”. 

This was certainly true for Mr Trump who made scant reference to their actual achievements. Who were the Navajo code talkers and why were they being honoured? They played a vital role in the Americans’ island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. Fighting in dense jungle and under intense Japanese fire, frontline troops found it impossible to lug cumbersome cipher machines, let alone encipher and decipher messages. In the heat of combat, as one journalist put it, the “King’s English became a last resort [for the troops] — the profaner the better”. The problem was that many Japanese had attended American universities, and were fluent in English, including the slang and swear words, so information about battlefield plans were falling into the hands of the Japanese. 

The idea of relying on the Navajos (pronounced Navaho), for battlefield communications came from Philip Johnston, an engineer and son of a Protestant missionary who grew up on the Navajo reservations in Arizona and spoke their language fluently. One of the largest Native American tribes in Arizona, the Navajo tongue had the virtue of being linguistically isolated, with no link with any Asian or European language. Johnstone suggested that the impenetrable nature of the language could act as an unbreakable code, and each battalion could employ a pair of Navajos as radio operators to guarantee secure communication. (The Choctaws had been similarly employed on the Western Front during World War I, the Navajos were chosen because, unlike other key tribes with some fluency in English, they had not been penetrated by German students purportedly studying tribal languages and customs.) 

One key problem, as Simon Singh explained in his 1999 book The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking, was that the Navajo language lacked equivalents for modern military jargon, so the Marine Corps “constructed a lexicon of Navajo terms to replace otherwise untranslatable English ones”. Fighter planes became hummingbirds, bombers were buzzards, bombs were eggs, submarines were iron fish and so on. These were transposed into the Navajo’s phonetic alphabet. Nations, too, had to be given Navajo nicknames: Britain was “Bounded by Water”, China was “Braided Hair”.  

Memorising these new terms was easy for a people whose heritage was passed on in oral family histories and folk stories. Despite being treated as an inferior people and living in harsh conditions, the Navajo tribal council agreed to support the war effort, and the first code talkers went in with the landing parties on Guadalcanal in August 1942.  

“The Navajo were to serve in all six Marine Corps divisions, and were sometimes borrowed by other American forces. Their war of words turned the Navajos into heroes,” Mr Singh wrote. Soldiers would offer to carry their rifles and radios, he added, and some were assigned personal bodyguards, partly to protect them from American soldiers mistaking them for Japanese. 

Mr Trump, a committed birther though neither sets of grandparents, nor his mother were born in the USA, took the trouble to point out that the Navajos were “here before any of us were here”.  What he may not understand, perhaps, is that like African Americans, they, too, made a vital contribution to American nation building.

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